The Heartland Institute

This Obamacare thing is not going as well as some had hoped. Democratic senators, at a caucus meeting with White House officials, expressed concerns on Thursday about how the Obama administration was carrying out the health care law they adopted three years ago. Democrats in both houses of Congress said some members of ...

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman criticized the state legislature’s Revenue Committee for advancing a bill to give special tax incentives to wind power companies and other expensive renewable power providers. Broad Tax Relief Preferred Heineman, a Republican, says the legislature should provide broad tax reductions for all Nebraskans rather ...

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, whose opposition to the original Keystone XL pipeline proposal emboldened federal opposition to the plan, announced he now supports the proposal. Heineman said Keystone’s revised route proposal within the Cornhusker State addresses his environmental concerns and will produce substantial economic benefits ...

Thanks to the work requirements in Obamacare, Nebraska school districts are considering cutting back hours for teachers and other employees to avoid getting hit by the employer mandate threshold. The AP reports: A lawyer for Nebraska public school districts said districts are considering cutting thousands of part-time non-teacher ...

There are, it seems to me, two basic perspectives on the right regarding the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. Last week saw one perspective from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who understands that it is enormously important to keep from expanding Medicaid, announcing a policy that will shift many in Wisconsin onto the federal ...

Global temperatures are warming much more slowly than claimed by British and U.S. government agencies that produce temperature data reports, according to data compiled by the Japanese Meteorological Agency. According to meteorologist Anthony Watts, Japan is reporting that global temperatures during the past decade are approximately ...

So why is it that the governors of Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming have all said no to a state-implemented health insurance exchange? Scott Walker’s letter explaining ...

Nebraska state lawmakers are considering changes to the state health insurance program after an audit found the program’s per capita cost to be the highest in the nation. Nebraska’s Legislative Performance Audit Committee has discussed possible legislation to address some of the concerns raised in the audit, including adding teeth ...

As Congress decides whether to allow the national capital gains tax rate to increase at the beginning of next year, states across the country are debating whether to change their own capital gains taxes. These are taxes paid by individuals and corporations on their capital gains, or profits realized when investors sell a capital ...

The United States has the highest corporate tax rate among the 34 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in addition to being one of the few nations still using a “worldwide system.” These are two reasons the United States is in dire need of fundamental corporate tax reform. Under the ...

Since the 2006–07 financial crisis the Federal Reserve has taken several steps to stimulate the economy and unfreeze credit markets, which had ground to a halt after the bursting of the housing bubble. The Federal Reserve launched its current monetary strategy in 2007, lowering the federal funds rate from 5.25 percent to effectively ...

A product that is quickly changing the telecom industry and how people communicate is voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calling, where voice and multimedia communication are conducted and transmitted over Internet protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP subscriptions have grown rapidly in recent years: According to ...

In the past two years, Omaha restaurant customers have paid around $50 million in taxes, and the city is now considering levying a new occupation tax on smokers. Occupation taxes are a kind of gross receipts tax, levied on gross income rather than net income, on an occupation or business. The proposed city ordinance would ...

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as the Food Stamp program, has become one of the fastest-growing welfare programs of the U.S. government. SNAP is administered by the Department of Agriculture, and the benefits are distributed by individual states. Currently, SNAP is the fourth-largest means ...

Since the late 1980s the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has conducted monetary policy primarily by setting a target for the nominal overnight federal funds rate. In late 2008 the FOMC set the target at zero. It has since indicated that it expects the target to remain at zero until late 2014. Should this happen, the ...

Tax increment financing has become a popular tool for encouraging economic development in municipalities across the country. Originally designed to help blighted areas attract businesses, tax increment financing, or “TIF,” has quickly become the subsidy of choice for towns seeking to spur development. TIF allows municipalities to ...

Yesterday, at the Republican National Convention, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice gave a superb speech covering many important issues. One issue she touched on that regrettably hasn’t been talked about enough this campaign season is education reform. For the United States to have sustained economic prosperity ...

Since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, legislators in the United States and across the world have proposed new taxes on certain financial transactions, including securities trading and stock transactions. For proponents of these financial transaction taxes the goal is twofold: to raise revenue for the national governments through ...

The Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission has undertaken several efforts to increase its regulatory power over the Internet by reclassifying broadband access services from their current status as an informational service to a Title II telecommunications service. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski launched a proposal ...

Nearly 50 million U.S. adults—more than a fifth of the total adult population—smoke cigarettes. After vigorous public health efforts including taxes, education, and outright bans on smoking, the percentage of Americans who smoke has fallen by almost half in the past four decades. In recent years, however, the number of Americans ...